Savannah-Chatham public schools officials are working to maximize limited resources, standardize access to coveted specialty school programs and clear up misconceptions about unfairness and inequity.

“We want to provide better opportunities for all children,” said Mikki Garcia, executive director of middle and K-8 schools.

With that in mind, officials decided to give more schools a piece of the district’s federal Title I funding for low-income students this year because more families are struggling economically and state education funding has declined.

The school district has 30 Title I funded schools in which the majority of the student body has economic need. And there are seven Title I targeted assisted schools. Those schools have low-income rates of at least 35 percent, and the funding is targeted at their academic needs.

“It gives additional resources to more schools. It’s a good thing,” said Chief Academic Officer Sharon Sand. “The school gets extra money for instruction, and the students receive free or reduced lunch.”

But low-income and Title I are often used as catchphrases for problematic, majority-black, inner-city schools. So when high performing, suburban schools with large populations of white students — the new Godley Station School, Garrison Arts K-8, Ellis and J.G. Smith — qualify for Title I targeted assisted services, eyebrows are raised.

“It has nothing to do with race or academic outcomes whatsoever,” Sand said. “It’s based on the number of free and reduced lunch applications we get at those schools, and the money is used to help those particular children with academic services.”

The brow furrowing continued when district officials began plans to standardize the admissions criteria to its rapidly evolving specialty program schools.

Garrison Arts K-8 Principal Lynette Angeloni sent letters home to parents to address concerns that admissions criteria and expectations might be lowered.

“The Esther F. Garrison School of Visual and Performing Arts will continue to have high expectations for all students,” she wrote.

The public school system’s specialty programs evolved from a system of specially enriched, academically themed, magnet programs the district created to increase diversity in the late 1980s as part of a federally mandated desegregation order.

After the order was lifted, some programs were so popular the district continued to offer them in various forms. Other programs were created as part of the district’s Passport to Excellence education reform plan. However, they all had different admissions criteria, some more strictly enforced than others.

“It’s very confusing to parents,” Sand said. “None of the specialty school requirements are the same. Parents wanted to know why their child could qualify for one and not the other, so we wanted to standardize them.”

In fact, at Garrison Arts K-8, there is no plan to change the current requirements for admission. Students will still be required to have an 80 overall grade point average, 4th stanine reading and math scores on a national assessment test like the ITBS, and an 825 on the state test, called the CRCT.

“By no means are we lowering expectations,” Sand said. “We’re trying to create specialty schools within the system with understandable entrance criteria.”

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The air is not completely clear! Will all grade levels have the same admissions criteria? Will students be required to maintain admissions criteria to continue enrollment the following year? Does discipline, or lack of, have a place in the criteria to continue enrollment? I would love to see the answers in print.